6 ms·

Labeling people as villains (as opposed to condemning acts), in particular those you don’t know personally, is almost always an unhelpful oversimplification of

• circus1540 9mo ago
  What if the root cause is that because we stopped labeling villains, they no longer fear being labeled as such. The consequences for the average lying academic have never been lower (in fact they usually don’t get caught and benefit from their lie).
  • tomtomtom777 9mo ago
    Are we living on the same planet? Surely the public discourse over the past decades has been steadily moving from substantive towards labeling each other villains, not the other way around.
    • Levitz 9mo ago
      But that kind of labeling happens because of having the wrong political stances, not because of the moral character of the person.
      • fc417fc802 9mo ago
        Most people seem to think that holding the "wrong" political stance is a failure of moral character so I'm having difficulty making sense of your point.
        • Levitz 9mo ago
          They truly don't. That's just part of the alienation. When the opposition is called evil it's not because logic dictates it must be evil, it's called evil for the same reason it's called ugly, unintelligent, weak, cowardly and every other sort of derogatory adjective under the sun. These accusations have little to do with how often people consider others things such as "ugly" or "weak", it's just signaling.
          • AnimalMuppet 9mo ago
            I disagree. There's an awful lot of "my position is obviously based on the data, so if you disagree it must be because you want to be evil". (In my opinion, the left does this more than the right, for whatever that's worth.)
            • fc417fc802 9mo ago
              If we expand "based on the data" to also include "based on my obviously correct ethical framework dictated by my obviously correct religion" then I figure the score is probably pretty close to even. The weird thing to me is how the far left has adopted behaviors that appear to be fundamentally religious in nature (imo) while fervently denying any such parallel.
    • bethekidyouwant 9mo ago
      For activist, politicians scientists, civilians? be specific
  • fc417fc802 9mo ago
    Actually the risks for academic misconduct have never been higher. For quite a while now there's been borderline activism to go out and search the literature for it - various custom software solutions have been written specifically to that end. We're also rapidly approaching a reality in which automated cross checking of the literature for contradictions will be possible. Unfortunately academia as a pursuit has never had a larger headcount and the incentives to engage in misconduct have likely never been higher (and appear to be steadily increasing).
• hexbin010 9mo ago
  I'm not a bad person, I just continuously do bad things, none of which is my fault - there is always a deeper root cause \o/
  • Ygg2 9mo ago
    On the flip side, even if you punish the villain, garbage papers still get printed. Almost like there is a root cause. Both views are maximalistic.
    • bavell 9mo ago
      On the flop side, maybe there wouldn't be as many garbage papers printed if there were any actual negative consequences. It's not so simple as you make it out to be.
      • hermannj314 9mo ago
        A national "War on Data", a Data enforcement agency (DEA), and a Data Abuse Resistence Education (DARE) program and we should have this problem wrapped up in no time. Negative consequences and money always work!
        • its_ethan 9mo ago
          They may not always work, but it's also not the case that they never work - which is what it seems like you're suggesting.
      • Ygg2 9mo ago
        There have been negative consequences for individuals before it didn't really change anything big.
• josfredo 9mo ago
  The person is inseparable from the root cause.
  • saikia81 9mo ago
    I'm guessing you believe that a person is always completely responsible for their actions. If you are doing root cause analysis you will get nowhere with that attitude.
    • stogot 9mo ago
      In the case of software RCA, but if a crime is committed then many times there is a victim. There could be some root cause, but ignoring the crime creates a new problem for the victim (justice) Both can be pursued without immediately jumping to defending a crime
    • Retric 9mo ago
      There’s many ways that people can fail where they aren’t the root cause. These failures aren’t on that list because they require active intent.
  • jcattle 9mo ago
    In that case let's just shut down the FAA and any accident investigations. It's not processes that can be fixed, it's just humans being stupid.
  • squibonpig 9mo ago
    Then "root cause" means basically nothing
  • subscribed 9mo ago
    I hope you don't work in technology. If you do, I hope I never work with you. Blameless post-mortems are critical for fixing errors that allowed incident to happen.
• mjburgess 9mo ago
  I'm not sure the problems we have at the moment are a lack of accountability. I mean, I think let's go a little overboard on holding people to account first, then wind it back when that happens. The crisis at the moment is mangeralism across all of our institutions which serves to displace accountability .
• zero_shift 9mo ago
  > Labeling people as villains is almost always an unhelpful oversimplification of reality This is effectively denying the existence of bad actors. We can introspect into the exact motives behind bad behaviour once the paper is retracted. Until then, there is ongoing harm to public science.
  • smt88 9mo ago
    I think they're actually just saying bad actors are inevitable, inconsistent, and hard to identify ahead of time, so it's useless to be a scold when instead you can think of how to build systems that are more resilient to bad acts
    • zero_shift 9mo ago
      To which my reply would be, we can engage in the analysis after we have taken down the paper. It's still up! Maybe the answer to building a resilient system lies in why it is still up.
    • mike_hearn 9mo ago
      You have to do both. Offense and defense are closely related. You can make it hard to engage in bad acts, but if there are no penalties for doing so or trying to do so, then that means there are no penalties for someone just trying over and over until they find a way around the systems. Academics that refuse to reply to people trying to replicate their work need to be instantly and publicly fired, tenure or no. This isn't going to happen, so the right thing to do is for the vast majority of practitioners to just ignore academia whilst politically campaigning for the zeroing of government research grants. The system is unsaveable.
      • michaelmrose 9mo ago
        Perhaps start by defunding any projects by institutions that insist on protecting fraudsters especially in the soft sciences. There is a lot of valuable hard science that IS real and has better standards.
• rolymath 9mo ago
  I would argue that villainy and "bad people" is an overcomplication of ignorance. If we equate being bad to being ignorant, then those people are ignorant/bad (with the implication that if people knew better, they wouldn't do bad things) I'm sure I'm over simplifying something, looking forward to reading responses.
• lo_zamoyski 9mo ago
  It’s possible to take two opposing and flawed views here, of course. On the one hand, it is possible to become judgmental, habitually jumping to unwarranted and even unfair conclusions about the moral character of another person. On the other, we can habitually externalize the “root causes” instead of recognizing the vice and bad choices of the other. The latter (externalization) is obvious when people habitually blame “systems” to rationalize misbehavior. This is the same logic that underpins the fantastically silly and flawed belief that under the “right system”, misbehavior would simply evaporate and utopia would be achieved. Sure, pathological systems can create perverse incentives, even ones that put extraordinary pressure on people, but moral character is not just some deterministic mechanical response to incentive. Murder doesn’t become okay because you had a “hard life”, for example. And even under “perfect conditions”, people would misbehave. In fact, they may even misbehave more in certain ways (think of the pathologies characteristic of the materially prosperous first world). So, yes, we ought to condemn acts, we ought to be charitable, but we should also recognize human vice and the need for justice. Justly determined responsibility should affect someone’s reputation. In some cases, it would even be harmful to society not to harm the reputations of certain people.
  • michaelmrose 9mo ago
    What specific pathologies characteristic of the materially prosperous first world? People almost universally behave better in a functional system with enough housing food education and so forth. Morality is and will always remain important but systems matter a LOT. For instance we've experienced less murder since we stopped mass lead poisoning our entire population. It's a paradox. We know for an absolute fact that changing the underlying system matters massively but we must continue to acknowledge the individual choice because the system of consequences and as importantly the system of shame keeps those who wouldn't act morally in check. So we punish the person who was probably lead poisoned the same as any other despite knowing that we are partially at fault for the system that lead to their misbehavior.
• andy99 9mo ago
  Just to add on, armchair quarterbacking is a thing, it’s easy in hindsight to label decisions as the result of bad intentions. This is completely different than whatever might have been at play in the moment and retrospective judgement is often unrealistic.
  • michaelmrose 9mo ago
    Every single comment on every thread on this entire website is armchair quarterbacking. It's completely obvious that this is dishonest bad work.
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
• regenschutz 9mo ago
  As with anything, it's just highly subjective. What some call an heinous act is another person's heroic act. Likewise, where I draw the line between an unlucky person and a villain is going to be different from someone else. Personally, I do believe that there are benefits to labelling others as villains if a certain threshold is met. It cognitively reduces strain by allowing us to blanket-label all of their acts as evil [0] (although with the drawback of occasionally accidentally labelling acts of good as evil), allowing us to prioritise more important things in life than the actions of what we call villains. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect#The_reverse_halo_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halo_effect#The_reverse_halo_e...
  • katzgrau 9mo ago
    It’s not really subjective if you don’t believe it’s your place to judge the human to begin with. If you were in their exact life circumstance and environment you would do the same thing. You aren’t going to magically sidestep cause and effect. The act itself is bad. The human performing the act was misguided. I view people as inherently perfect whose view of life, themselves, and their current situations as potentially misguided. Eg, like a diamond covered in shit. Just like it’s possible for a diamond to be uncovered and polished, the human is capable of acquiring a truer perspective and more aligned set of behaviors - redemption. Everyone is capable of redemption so nobody is inherently bad. Thinking otherwise may be convenient but is ultimately misguided too. So the act and the person are separate. Granted, we need to protect society from such misguidedness, so we have laws, punishments, etc. But it’s about protecting us from bad behavior, not labeling the individual as bad.
    • WalterBright 9mo ago
      > If you were in their exact life circumstance and environment you would do the same thing. I don't buy that for a moment. It presumes people do not have choices. The difference between a man and an animal is a man has honor. Each of us gets to choose if we are a man or an animal.
      • 9mo ago
• the_arun 9mo ago
  Questions: 1. Who is responsible for adding guardrails to ensure all papers coming in are thoroughly checked & reviewed? 2. Who review these papers? Shouldn’t they own responsibility for accuracy? 3. How are we going to ensure this is not repeated by others?
  • convolvatron 9mo ago
    reviewers are unpaid. its also quite common to farm out the actual review work to grad students, postdocs and the like. if you're suggesting adding liability, then you're just undermining the small amount of review that already takes place.
  • nobodyandproud 9mo ago
    There needs to be prestige for tearing down heavily flawed work.
• nickpsecurity 9mo ago
  That comment sounds like the environment causes bad behavior. That's a liberal theory refuted consistently by all the people in bad environments who choose to not join in on the bad behavior, even at a personal loss. God gave us free will to choose good or evil in various circumstances. We need to recognize that in our assessments. We must reward good choices and address bad ones (eg the study authors'). We should also change environments to promote good and oppose evil so the pressures are pushing in the right direction.
• direwolf20 9mo ago
  Labeling people as villains used to be effective deterrence against doing villainous things. When did that change?
  • jrjeksjd8d 9mo ago
    Ah yes, the mythical past when nobody did bad things because we punished them correctly.
    • WalterBright 9mo ago
      The crime rate does change dramatically over time. For example, the homicide rate during the pandemic was about double what it is today.
      • fn-mote 9mo ago
        Sure, but are you implying that is because of our stricter enforcement of the laws? Or other systemic / environmental causes (eg systemic poor mental health)? I am unfamiliar with the reasons to which the varying murder rate is ascribed. If I had to guess, I would guess economics is #1.
  • tikhonj 9mo ago
    It's also pretty clearly a deterrence against people admitting and fixing their own mistakes, both individually and as institutions. Which is exactly what we're seeing here...
    • jason_oster 9mo ago
      Correlation is not causation.
    • direwolf20 9mo ago
      You wouldn't be a villain from doing one bad thing, but a pattern.
  • WalterBright 9mo ago
• Aurornis 9mo ago
  In this case they hadn’t labeled anyone as villains, though. They could have omitted that section entirely. I happen to agree that labeling them as villains wouldn’t have been helpful to this story, but they didn’t do that. > It obscures the root causes of why the bad things are happening, and stands in the way of effective remedy. There’s a toxic idea built into this statement: It implies that the real root cause is external to the people and therefore the solution must be a systemic change. This hits a nerve for me because I’ve seen this specific mindset used to avoid removing obviously problematic people, instead always searching for a “root cause” that required us all to ignore the obvious human choices at the center of the problem. Like blameless postmortems taken to a comical extreme where one person is always doing some careless that causes problems and we all have to brainstorm a way to pretend that the system failed, not the person who continues to cause us problems.
  • fc417fc802 9mo ago
    > There’s a toxic idea built into this statement: It implies that the real root cause is external to the people and therefore the solution must be a systemic change. Not necessarily, although certainly people sometimes fall into that trap. When dealing with a system you need to fix the system. Ejecting a single problematic person doesn't fix the underlying problem - how did that person get in the door in the first place? If they weren't problematic when they arrived, does that mean there were corrosive elements in the environment that led to the change? When a person who is a cog within a larger machine fails that is more or less by definition also an instance of the system failing. Of course individual intent is also important. If Joe dropped the production database intentionally then in addition to asking "how the hell did someone like him end up in this role in the first place" you will also want to eject him from the organization (or at least from that role). But focusing on individual intent is going to cloud the process and the systemic fix is much more important than any individual one. There's also a (meta) systemic angle to the above. Not everyone involved in carrying out the process will be equally mature, objective, and deliberate (by which I mean that unfortunately any organization is likely to contain at least a few fairly toxic people). If people jump to conclusions or go on a witch hunt that can constitute a serious systemic dysfunction in and of itself. Rigidly adhering to a blameless procedure is a way to guard against that while still working towards the necessary systemic changes.
• michaelmrose 9mo ago
  One thing that stands in the way of other people choosing the wrong path is the perception of consequences. Minimal consequences by milquetoast critics who just want to understand is a bug not a feature. People are on average both bad and stupid and function without a framework of consequences and expectations where they expect to suffer and feel shame. They didn't make a mistake they stood in front of all their professional colleagues and published effectively what they knew were lies. The fact that they can publish lies and others are happy to build on lies ind indicates the whole community is a cancer. The fact that the community rejects calls for correction indicates its metastasized and at least as far as that particular community the patient is dead and there is nothing left to save. They ought to be properly ridiculed and anyone who has published obvious trash should have any public funds yanked and become ineligible for life. People should watch their public ruin and consider their own future action. If you consider the sheer amount of science that has turned out to be outright fraud in the last decade this is a crisis.
• rdiddly 9mo ago
  You presumably read the piece. There was no remedy. In fact the lavishly generous appreciation of all those complexities arguably is part of the reason there was no remedy. (Or vice versa, i.e. each person's foregone conclusion that there will be no remedy for whatever reason, might've later been justified/rationalized via an appeal to those complexities.) The act itself, of saying something other than the truth, is always more complex than saying the truth. ← It took more words to describe the act in that very sentence. Because there are two ideas, the truth and not the truth. If the two things match, you have a single idea. Simple. Speaking personally, if someone's very first contact with me is a lie, they are to be avoided and disregarded. I don't even care what "kind of person" they are. In my world, they're instantly declared worthless. It works pretty well. I could of course be wrong, but I don't think I'm missing out on any rich life experiences by avoiding obvious liars. And getting to the root cause of their stuff or rehabilitating them is not a priority for me; that's their own job. They might amaze me tomorrow, who knows. But it's called judgment for a reason. Such is life in the high-pressure world of impressing rdiddly.
• shermantanktop 9mo ago
  Bad acts are in the past, and may be situational or isolated. Labelling a person as bad has predictive power - you should expect them to do bad acts again. It might be preferable to instead label them as “a person with a consistent history of bad acts, draw your own conclusion, but we are all capable of both sin and redemption and who knows what the future holds”. I’d just call them a bad person. That said, I do think we are often too quick to label people as bad based one bad act.
• praxulus 9mo ago
  It is possible that the root cause is an individual person being bad. This hasn't been as common recently because people were told not to be villains and to dislike villains, so root causes of the remaining problems were often found buried in the machinery of complex social systems. However if we stop teaching people that villains are bad and they shouldn't be villains, we'll end up with a whole lot more problems of the "yeah that guy is just bad" variety.